Here are the slides I gave recently as member of panel Sci-Fi Dreams: How visions of the future are shaping the development of intelligent technology, at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence 2017 conference. I presented three short stories about robot stories.

Happy International World Book and Copyright Day! Here at Robohub, we’re celebrating by sharing our list of 20 robot related books (in no particular order) aimed at engaging kids and/or teens with everything robotics. Ranging from funny fictional narratives to DIY drone building and coding, these books are sure to fire the imaginations of our future innovators and creators.

A new book by Lentin Joseph, ROS Robotics Programming, outlines more than 14 robotics projects using ROS that can be engaged with without requiring a lot of hardware. The book starts with an introduction to ROS and its installation procedure. After discussing the basics, you’ll be taken through great projects such as building a self-driving car, an autonomous mobile robot, and image recognition using deep learning and ROS. You can find ROS robotic applications for beginner, intermediate, and expert levels inside.

I have been part of many software teams where we desired to do code reviews. In most of those cases the code reviews did not take place, or were pointless and a waste of time. So the question is: how do you effectively conduct peer reviews in order to improve the quality of your systems?

I found this book, Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide by Karl E. Wiegers. This book was recommended to me, and having “practical guide” in the title caught my attention — I have reviewed other books that claimed practical, but were not. Hopefully this book will help provide me (and you) with tools for conducting valuable code reviews.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning John Markoff has been covering the technology beat at the New York Times for almost three decades, and recently published Machines of Loving Grace – a book that chronicles the evolution of robotics and AI. In this interview we turn the lens around and ask Markoff about what motivates his interest to report on robotics, and how he sees trends in robotics today being informed by people and events from the past.

A new book by Lentin Joseph, Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming, discusses advanced concepts in robotics and how to implement them using ROS. Readers will learn how to build models of complex robots, and how to simulate and interface their robots using the ROS MoveIt! and the ROS navigation stack. Just released this past December, this 481-page book is one of the most advanced books on ROS currently available.

If you follow technology news — or even if you don’t — you have probably heard that numerous companies have been trying to develop driverless cars for a decade or more. These fully automated vehicles could potentially be safer than regular cars, and might add various efficiencies to our roads, like smoother-flowing traffic. Or so it is often claimed. But the promise of artificial intelligence, advanced sensors, and self-driving cars could be achieved without full autonomy, argue scholars with deep expertise in automation and technology — including David Mindell, an MIT professor and author of a new book on the subject.

Practical Field Robotics: A Systems Approach by Robert H. Sturges, Jr. from Virginia Tech is an interesting book about how to design a field robot from a high level systems approach, and how to build a robotic lawnmower.

A new book, Learning Robotics using Python, takes a different approach to teaching the Robotics Operating System (ROS). Written by Lentin Joseph, founder and CEO of Indian robotics startup Qbotics Labs, it enables you to learn by building an interactive, autonomous, mobile robot, and is the result of his research while designing the company’s autonomous robot prototype, Chefbot. It features Artificial Intelligence, vision capabilities, speech recognition and synthesis.

It seems like our most popular visions of the future always end with environmental collapse, authoritarian oppression … and the ever-popular zombie apocalypse. Project Hieroglyph challenges science fiction writers to collaborate deeply with researchers working at the cutting edge of knowledge, not just as fact checkers, but as equal partners. We need your help transforming these big ideas into new collective realities. Won’t you join us?

This is an excerpt from The Drone Primer: A Compendium of the Key Issues, a free, one-stop, handbook addressing the basic and fundamental questions around drones in all their contexts, from foreign theaters of war to domestic civilian use. This basic report covers technology, history, strategy, law, and culture, and includes a portfolio of drone art.